An AK74 in .224 Valkyrie Exists and can Touch 800 Yards (VIDEOS)

For the past two years, everyone has been jumping on the boat that is the bottlenecked .224 Valkyrie long range cartridge, and now there may be an AK74 that can handle it as well. Brandon Herrera, the AK Guy, has been quietly working on the project for a while and debuted the prototype, built from a Bulgarian kit with a custom barrel, last week.

A Type 07 FFL in Fayetteville, North Carolina, Herrera has been best known in the past for his AK-50 project, to develop a .50-caliber Kalash, but it seems the AK-224 as he calls it, will beat that gun to the market. He intends to make at least a limited run of the guns, hand built on heavily modified AK-74 parts kits with a purpose-built .224 Valkyrie AK barrel. The neat thing is that the round feeds from a standard AK 5.45mm mag, although he notes they should be limited to 10 rounds to ensure proper feeding.

Below is a longer video and an in-depth breakdown of the AK-224, which Herrera wants to ultimately turn into a 1,000-yard capable AK. The prototype was able to go 800– and that is with a penny shimmed under the dust cover.

All up price on the guns, for which he is taking deposits, is expected to be in the sub-$2K neighborhood “depending on options and production demands.”

As a background of the Valkyrie, the round was introduced by Federal in 2017 as a way to stretch AR platforms past the 500-yard wall and has since been picked up since then by numerous rifle and cartridge makers. Guns.com’s Ben Brown recently stacked it up against the 6.5 Grendel, which it is most often compared to.

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